The Glenn Beck Effect and the Surprising History of the Separation of Church and State.

27 min readOct 19, 2024

The first threats came on social media, and almost seemed polite. They went something like: “A lot of people are pretty angry with you, so you might consider moving somewhere less dangerous before it’s too late.”

The supernatural scare tactics were generally, but not exclusively, delivered face-to-face. Example: “The Lord God is going to sentence you to eternal damnation within the fires of Hell if you don’t stop what you’re doing.” Which made me a bit nostalgic for the good old days of my childhood with all the nuns, priests, and Jesuit Brothers threatening burning pits of fire for eternity for my impure thoughts. Not to mention that creepy bearded guy in the red overcoat who surveilled me and broke into our house every winter. It was enough to make a kid rather paranoid.

Economic ultimatums were delivered by a guy wearing an NRA hat — which I took to mean that he worked for the National Restaurant Association? Without preamble, he strode up to me one day near the Veterans Memorial and declared, “We’re going to organize a boycott of your business and get all your relatives fired from their jobs.”

I said, “I’m an artist and I don’t sell my paintings locally — and all my relatives live in Chicago or Alaska.”

I could tell he was struggling for a zinger comeback, but finally just managed the rather predictable, “You’re going to burn in Hell!”

I said, “I don’t believe in Hell, unless you count listening to Presidential Debates.”

He turned and stalked off. I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for torpedoing his plan, which he’d clearly put a lot of thought into developing.

Next up was a lawyer who called and said his client was revoking his signed release form and that if I didn’t remove his client from my documentary — especially the part where his client said he’d kill his own children if God ordered him to — he’d sue me. I pointed out that retroactively revoking a signed release form wasn’t legal. He didn’t deny this, but pointed out it would cost me a lot of money to defend myself against a lawsuit. I told him — and the others who threatened such legal escapades — that I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my (and their) money. I fantasized about getting Allie McBeal to represent me. Sadly, I never heard back from any of them.

The one thing that really started to annoy me was my mailbox. Around this time, it developed a strange habit of flinging itself off the pole next to our country road in the dead of night and ending up all disfigured in the woods across the street. Was it unhappy about how we treated it? Had I inadvertently offended it with some offhand remark? Had it joined a punk rock band?

Hammering it back into shape and then remounting it onto its pole week after week became tiresome. At some point, I considered an alternate explanation. What if this was the work of people who simply hated mail? Sure, I wasn’t a fan of all the junk mail, political fliers, and bills that showed up in the mailbox, but it wasn’t the mailbox’s fault for giving sanctuary to all the junk deposited inside it. Blaming the messenger is never fair, and there are some good things that turn up in mailboxes as well. Heck, a sparrow made a nest in an old mailbox on our back porch, for example. Some might find all those chirping baby chicks a nuisance — but not me or Susan.

In my zeal to protect my hardworking mailbox from mailbox terrorists, I considered purchasing a video surveillance camera, but there’s no streetlights on our isolated country road and a camera wouldn’t capture much without lighting, and burying wires would be a major undertaking.

Instead, I drew up a brilliant plan to affix an aluminum metal coat of armor around the mailbox, with a bag of red house-paint nestled underneath. It would look identical to a normal severely abused mailbox, except that a gush of red paint would explode outward toward the street if impacted by someone leaning out their car window with a bat or pipe at high speed. This seemed like the perfect low-cost solution to deter mailbox bigotry!

When I mentioned my brilliant plan to Susan, she proposed a few scenarios — like someone being blinded by exploding red paint, crashing their car, and me being arrested and put into the local jail run by Christian police officers who might not be great fans of my documentary.

Don’t you hate when people burst your brilliant plans with brilliant logic?

After a while, the assaults on the poor defenseless mailbox mysteriously stopped.

I figured people had gotten the hint that I was too dim to take a hint, and mostly moved on — until…

The owner of a local business walked up to me in a parking lot and said that he was a devout Baptist, but watching my YouTube documentary had convinced him that separating religion from government was actually a pretty good thing for both. He was disgusted with the very un-Christian words and actions of some of the people I interviewed in my film — most of whom he knew from church.

I said, “Geeze, thanks. That really makes me feel good.”

Then he said, “But if I publicly declared my support of separation of church and state, my business would be boycotted out of existence and my family would suffer, so I hope you understand that I’m going to have to keep nodding in agreement when people at church say that you’re a demonic Satan-worshiping commie atheist that should be run out of town.”

“I suppose that makes pretty good sense,” I said a bit sadly.

The business owner glanced about to make double-sure none of his congregational friends who might bankrupt him were in earshot. “Ever since your documentary hit YouTube and went infectious, a lot of people around here are talking about how easy it would be to “take you out” since your house is so isolated with woods all around it. One militia member shared your address with everyone, so you need to take this seriously.”

I felt suddenly nauseous, but that might be explained by the five chili dogs I’d had for lunch. Why hadn’t I limited myself to the usual four?

The whole mess started in 2010 when a soldier named Steven Hewett, who had served in Afghanistan, rashly decided to return to his home in the very small town of King, North Carolina, where his wife was a school teacher in the public school. The brave veteran was distressed to see the town’s public veteran’s memorial adorned with a merrily waving Christian Flag.

Since the brave veteran had taken a sacred oath to defend the constitution, he called the town’s city manager and explained that the public veteran’s memorial was supposed to honor all veterans of all religions, and that using tax dollars to exclusively promote the Christian religion over the others, no matter how silly all the others admittedly seemed, was illegal because of the principal of Separation of Church and State as enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, of which all soldiers take an oath to defend. And so, our brave veteran requested that his town remove the Christian Flag from the memorial.

Instead of thanking the brave veteran for pointing this out to him and saying that he’d advise the mayor and city council to replace the Christian flag with something more useful (like a mailbox?), the city manager told our brave veteran that he, the city manager, would not remove the Christian flag under any circumstances, and that brave veteran Steve was going to Hell for his blasphemy. Then, the city manager hung up on him.

Soon after, a letter from the ACLU was dispatched by carrier-owl to the town’s practical-minded-fiscally-responsible legal counsel, who advised the very-Christian mayor and the equally very-Christian city council members that the town of King would lose in court and squander a lot of tax dollars if the evil American Civil Liberty Union took them to court, so the practical-minded-fiscally-responsible town leaders reluctantly removed the Christian flag from the memorial.

Which ignited a firestorm of protests from a lot of less-practical-minded and not-so-fiscally-responsible city residents. These protests were televised by very practical-minded-fiscally-responsible news conglomerates that craved something to get their very-Christian viewers outraged in order to boost ratings and charge more for commercials.

This is when someone in town gave me a DVD of the resulting march and rally of five thousand very-Christian protesters marching through King waving Christian Flags and congealing in the town park where the Christian Flag had been removed from the pole by the very nervous practical-minded-fiscally-responsible town leaders.

David Gibbs III of the Christian Law Association had been flown in to give the keynote angry rant. “How many believe it’s time for America to stop pretending we’re not Christian!?” (cheers) “And if there’s people in King, North Carolina who don’t like that, there’s lots of places you can move to!” (cheers) “And if you know who they are, ENCOURAGE them to move!” (frightening cheers)

The five thousand Christians in the crowd, our state congressman, senator, mayor, and local mega-church preacher all cheered and waved their Christian Flags as speech after speech called for the end of Separation of Church and State and the establishment of a Christian government.

Some of the very-Christian Christians, in the spirit of love thy neighbor as thyself and the Golden Rule, went from business to business and handed out Christian flag placards to place in their windows, under the not-so-subtle threat of boycott if they refused. Everyone complied out of solidarity to the cause, whether or not they agreed with it. A few Christians and non-Christians told me that they didn’t at all agree with this, but knew that freedom of speech looked good on paper, but not so good as a practical matter when facing a mob of Christian-flag wavers.

That phrase, “ENCOURAGE them to move!” kept monotonously repeating in my mind like a scratched record from my youth — yes, I’m really that old.

I told Susan we were going to put our house up for sale the next day and move somewhere more tolerant.

She shrugged and said, “Sure. Maybe we can check out New England.”

The next morning, as stubborn old people often do, I changed my mind about running away and letting the bullies win without a fight. This strategy had not worked out so well in grade school, but I’m a big believer in trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result, which I’m told is the definition of ingenuity. Or was it the definition of insanity? I’ve never been great at spelling, either.

In any case, I took my recently purchased video camera (meant for filming my pet spider monkeys painting art instructional videos that I pretend I painted) down to the Veteran’s Memorial in King’s Public Park and started interviewing people who were camping out and protesting every day in a marathon vigil in hopes of restoring the Christian flag to its rightful pole so God wouldn’t punish America.

Everyone I interviewed believed that Separation of Church and State was a myth and that the Founders intended the United States to be an exclusively Christian Nation from the start. And thusly, began a pretty insane year-and-a-half journey in my spare time to find out the truth and source of the idea of Separation of Church and State (and if I was actually the stupidest person alive, or only the runner-up). The story quickly became as much about what we believe about all sorts of things and how we evaluate truth itself.

Although I started the project out of anger, I ended up liking the people I interviewed on all sides of the issue. This diffused my negative emotions to the point where I felt a responsibility to fairly represent the viewpoints of even those I disagreed with the most. To that end, I did no narration, but let the people on both sides give their opinions and evidence in their own words — as shocking as some of those opinions were. No one would believe what some people said to me in those interviews if I hadn’t recorded it on video.

I came to realize that even those threatening me and others with violence were acting for what they believed was the greater good based on facts they deeply believed were true.

Who was the source of these facts?

When I started doing interviews for my documentary, just about everyone mentioned David Barton and Glenn Beck. One of the protesters actually took me to his home a few blocks away for me to watch a recording he’d made of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show where he dedicated an entire hour to historian David Barton presenting evidence that the founders had never intended the separation of church and state. Barton and Beck spoke of the dire urgency for the government to resume officially promoting Christianity in schools and everywhere else in society, lest the United States loses its divine protection as a Christian Nation.

Beck, having debuted his Fox News show the day before President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, rocketed to number one in the ratings. Here’s a few of his documented statements for you to interpret as you will.

*In the Summer of 2009, Beck told viewers of the morning show Fox & Friends that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people” and followed up by calling him “a racist.”

* Beck suggested Obama was faking being a Christian, but was likely actually a Muslim with a secret agenda. (the August 24, 2010, edition of Glenn Beck)

* Beck suggests the Obama Administration might kill “10 Percent” of the U.S. population, and is more corrupt than Nixon. (from the June 10, 2010, edition of Glenn Beck)

* Beck suggested if he met Nancy Pelosi, he’d secretly put poison in her wine glass. (August 6, 2009, edition of Fox News’ Glenn Beck)

(To be up front with you about my bias, I didn’t particularly like those statements, since I took two weeks off from painting to volunteer going door-to-door on Obama’s behalf here in rural Stokes County that is about 80% against Obama.)

*Early in 2009, Beck promoted the conspiracy theory that Obama intended to turn FEMA relief camps into concentration camps to imprison his political enemies — though he admitted he had no proof. Sometime later on, Glenn said he had finally looked into those claims and disproven them. So, Obama was off the hook on that one — at least for those who were watching his follow-up about-face.

Imagine if I heard someone say — without any proof — that Glenn Beck was a Kangaroo molester, and that I then announced it to a few million Kangaroos who trusted me? Yes, I know not many Kangaroos would trust me saying something this outrageous without evidence, but pretend I didn’t look so untrustworthy as I actually do for this hypothetical thought-experiment, and that Kangaroos are a lot more gullible than they actually are — just for argument’s sake.

Might you not say that my rumor mongering put Glenn in danger of a boxing Kangaroo attacking him for committing his non-existent Kangaroo atrocities?

Suppose I announced months later that I’d finally looked into the Kangaroo molestation claim and realized that the rumor I’d repeated about Glenn was actually a vile lie spread by Tasmanian Devils with a grudge against Kangaroos. Would this belated correction exonerate me?

I realize Glenn has the right of free speech to say what he wants on his show, but when you have the top rated prime-time show in the country watched by millions, I think you have a moral responsibility to check your facts before repeating such an incendiary claim to gullible Kangaroos. But, that’s just me, and I understand you might feel differently. To this day, I still hear people repeat that false Obama’s FEMA concentration camp conspiracy as fact. Feel free to google the many other apocalyptic conspiracy theories Glenn is famous for spreading on his show if you want to plummet down that rabbit hole.

Anyhow, David Barton was the top seller of American History books on the subject of the Founders, so I had to admit my ignorance on how the concept of the separation of church and state came about in this country. Were Beck and Barton right about the founders’ intentions?

So, I read one of David Barton’s books, did some peyote to cleanse myself, then did some research of my own that definitely didn’t involve molesting Kangaroos, and finally traveled to Virginia to interview John A. Ragosta about his book, Wellspring of Liberty; How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty.

In my interview for the film, John laid out a surprising history.

“Let’s talk about 18th century Virginia, which is really the crux of how things develop,” John says in my film. “Before the revolution, you have an Anglican church. You pay taxes for the Anglican minister. You will be married in the Anglican church. If you’re not married in the Anglican church — if your Baptist minister marries you — your children are bastards, technically, which means they can’t take part in probate court. They can’t testify in any court. You will go to Anglican church twice a month.

“And then things get worse,” John explained. “They started to harass Baptist and Presbyterian preachers. They would beat them. Sometimes people would gather in an open field for a meeting — and especially Baptist meetings. People on horseback would ride through the meetings whipping people.

“Starting in 1768 they start throwing Baptist and Presbyterian ministers who don’t have a license — and it’s very hard to get a license — they start throwing them in jail. Some of the Baptists refused to get a license. They say, ‘Look, we report to King Jesus. That’s the one that told us to be a minister. I got a calling, the spirit moved me. I don’t go to the government to get a license to preach. They throw them in jail. By the time of the American Revolution there were over fifty Baptist ministers who had been jailed for preaching. That’s over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia.”

“You’d have a Baptist minister preaching in a field or a meeting house, and they’d go and grab them, drag them out to the closest body of water — pond, lake, river — and dunk them. They’d say, ‘You Baptists seem to like dunking people, so we’ll dunk you.’ There’s one case recorded where they took this minister out and held him under water until he almost drowned, and when they pulled him up he’d be gasping for breath and they’d say, ‘Do you believe, do you believe?’ and then they’d dunk him back under the water. And finally, they’d pull him back up and say, ‘Do you believe?’ and he said, ‘I believe you mean to kill me!’”

“The largest tax being paid in 18th century Virginia is the tax paid for Anglican ministers.”

“You look at Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina. In these states, the Baptists and Presbyterians were often Loyalists. They supported the British. That may seem odd, and maybe people aren’t so proud of that history, but the reason for that was because they had local governments which discriminated in favor of the Anglican church….At Mores Creek Bridge in North Carolina, that was a very important battle. The Loyalists were Presbyterians and Baptists who were fighting for the King.

“Virginia [by far the largest population of all the colonies] is the one state in the south where that doesn’t happen. Why?

“If you look at the records — they were looking out to the western parts of Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, this area of the Piedmont, which were particularly Presbyterian. Those are the people with rifles. We have muskets in the Tidewater. Morgan’s Riflemen, who are critical in Saratoga and the Cowpens and some of these battles. They’re Presbyterians! And so, you actually have in some of the legislative debates in Virginia people saying, ‘We’ve got to get some of those western riflemen on our side.’ Well, they’re Presbyterians. How do you get Presbyterians on your side when you’ve been discriminating against them? Imposing taxes upon them. Throwing their people in jail. Well, you better stop. You better have religious freedom.”

“Baptists and Presbyterians ought to be proud of the role they played in developing religious freedom. But then you get to an interesting question. When they bargained for religious freedom, what was the religious freedom they bargained for? What did they think they were getting?… This is where they say (in petitions to the government) over and over again, ‘We want religious freedom not just for us, but we want it for the Jews, for the Muslims, for the Hindus, for the Atheists, for the Pagans. We want government out of religion.’

“These are deeply faithful people saying, ‘We don’t want government involved with religion. The state has always corrupted the church.’ You have people like Thomas Jefferson saying we want separation of church and state to protect the government.”

When the Constitution was created, there was no separation of religion from the federal government, and in fact nine of the states actively wanted to establish a national church. The Baptists and Presbyterians, having been promised religious freedom and separation of church and state in return for fighting on the side of the Patriots, felt betrayed. Led by Baptist Reverend John Leland, they threatened to use their numerical superiority in Virginia and Massachusetts to reject ratification of the constitution.

Leland wrote, “The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever — Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration, the very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes some a pre-eminence above the rest is a great indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans, and Christians.”

In a panic, James Madison (now known as the father of the Constitution) rushed to meet with Leland. In a historic three-hour discussion, they cut a deal. If Leland would encourage his Baptist followers to vote for the federal constitution, Madison promised that the absolute first thing he would do would be to bring about an amendment that guaranteed freedom of religion and the rejection of a national church.

Not all of the nation’s founders were in favor of this. Some did want a national government and others did not. But they knew that without the support of the growing number of “dissenter religions,” there would be no constitution and no united nation. So, the majority gave into this overall minority of “dissenters” and agreed to the terms of a strict separation of church and state in order to unify everyone in ratifying the constitution.

This is rather similar to the compromises northern states made in giving southern states more representation in the House of Representatives by also counting slaves as 3/5th of a person in the census. This served to sooth southern slaveholder fears that the federal government would simply legalize slavery once they had the majority of votes in Congress. Not to mention the twenty-year congressional probation of ending the transatlantic slave trade demanded by South Carolina to protect its near monopoly in Charleston as import hub for overseas slave ships. (If you’re not familiar with Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution — read my essay tiled Slave Breeding Farms and Two-Dollar Bills if you really want your mind blown.)

The idea of saying “The Founders intended” about anything is kind of silly. They weren’t ever all on the same page about most things, and the negotiations with all the holdouts meant a lot of horse-trading to get everyone on board. It’s amazing that the Constitution ever happened. The fear of the European powers picking them off one by one was in the back of everyone’s mind during these tenuous negotiations. The founders compromised in order to create a union — with mechanisms in place for future generations to improve and mold into a “more perfect Union.”

And so, the constitution was ratified and the First Amendment added as demanded by those winy Baptists and Presbyterians — except that the First Amendment only applied to the Federal Government. Individual states were still free to set up their own state churches, religious taxes, and rules discriminating on the basis of religion for holding state office and all sorts of other things.

This really peeved the Baptists, Presbyterians — and especially Jefferson, who set about disestablishing religion in his state of Virginia which became the first of the colonies to fully embrace what he called “a wall of separation between Church and State.”

John Rigosta laughed as he described to me the panic that followed Virginia’s action. “Lyman Beecher, for example, is a famous minister in the 19th century (as well as the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, future famed abolitionist and author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”)…and president of Yale, which is a church school at that time. The Jeffersonians go to Connecticut at the time to disestablish religion, and Lyman Beecher says that without a state-supported religion we can’t have a moral government. Some of the things they say were crazy — ‘Our daughters will be prostitutes; the Bible will be burned…’

“Well, about ten years after it’s done, Lyman Beecher comes out and admits he was wrong. He says this is the best thing that’s ever happened to religion because now people have to actually decide to be religious, as opposed to the government telling you that you’ve got to go to church or you’ve got to be Christian. My book is about the 18th century, but the 19th century Evangelicals get it. It’s the 20th century Evangelicals…”

Over time, more and more states followed the example of Virginia in fully separating church and state until the Supreme Court applied this principle more broadly to all states so that freedom of and from religion wasn’t based on state geography. Curiously, the North Carolina constitution (and seven other state constitutions) still ban atheists from holding any office — and a few such evil god-deniers occasionally go to court to challenge such provisions even to become notary publics, with mixed results. Fortunately, I’m not interested in being a notary public, let alone governor!

In making the film, I also interviewed famed Baptist minister Reverend James Dunn, who had led the Baptist Joint Committee for Separation of Church and State in Washington D.C. for twenty years before retiring from that post to help found the school of divinity at Wake Forest in North Carolina. After interviewing him, we became close friends and had lunch at least once a month at the Tavern in Reynolda Village where I’m writing these words.

When my documentary came out, James asked me to accompany his class of divinity students to D.C. and show my film and discuss the topic along with Kathleen Kennedy (daughter of Bobby Kennedy), who had herself written a book dealing with the importance of separation of church and state.

We spent several days in the capitol and in the White House for presentations by many prominent religious freedom activists.

While our group bunked at a Quaker boarding house over several days, three of James’ young divinity students told me that they were secretly atheists as well, but were hiding it from their families. When I told this to James — without revealing the names of the students — he laughed and said, “Isn’t that marvelous! That’s the entire point of education and freedom of religion. The freedom to think for one’s self and make up their own mind. My only sadness is that they feel the need to hide their views. It shows we still have a long way to go in this country for true religious freedom.”

Here’s one speech I filmed of James preaching at the First Baptist Church in Raleigh. “We have Baptists — can you believe it? — We have Baptists that wear the name and think they deserve to and don’t! Because if there is a key insight that has bound Baptists in this country and in Europe and in South America and in Asia and other parts of the world together, it’s this understanding of church-state separation.”

James passed away a few years ago and I will miss him immeasurably — and carry on his fight for religious freedom. We had different guesses as to the existence of God and an afterlife, but shared the certainty that faith should be up to the individual to freely decide without any interference of the state and without having to pay taxes to support someone else’s religious belief over another.

I respected Jame’s belief and he respected my disbelief, and we had hours of wonderful philosophical conversations on just about every topic under the sun, with loads of laughter at the absurdity of most things in the world we had little control over. In general, I find it easier talking to someone with as much skepticism in their own infallibility as I have in mine.

Anyhow, when I returned to King (the majority of whom are Baptists) I wondered how people would react when I showed them the evidence contradicting Barton and Beck’s claims about the origins of separation of church and state. One after the other, I explained what were in the documents provided by the historians, and not one person would look at them. “That historian is in league with Satan,” more than a few said to me. The consensus was that just looking at such lies might endanger one’s soul.

After about eight months of filming, one of the Christian protesters finally asked me if I was a Christian, and I told her I was an atheist. She was shocked, since she, and many others I’d interviewed had told me that they could recognize an atheist on the street in an instant from “seeing Satan in their eyes.” I had expected this question a lot earlier and had determined to tell the truth if asked. After that, all the protesters refused to talk to me, but I kept documenting the story out of a desire to see it through to the end.

The city council finally instituted their open public forum where residents could submit their name into a lottery for each week of the next year. Those drawn in the lottery could fly whatever flag they wanted on the memorial for their allotted week. It was clear that they relied on intimidation to keep anyone from flying anything but the Christian flag — no surprise there — and it worked. Several people who had planned on entering the lottery to fly other flags — Wiccan, Hindu, and some others — backed out after being threatened by bosses at work with firing, or retribution against family members. I didn’t include any of their interviews in the film at their request for fear that they’d be targeted.

And so, the Christian Flag returned to its pole on the memorial.

Steven Hewett, the Afghan veteran who began the ruckus — and a couple of brave women in town — opted to fly no-flag on their week. During one such naked-pole week, an atheist mother of four noticed that a small metal cross had been placed inside the clear box in violation of the public forum’s rules for a no-flag week. She asked if anyone knew who had placed it there, and a Vietnam Veteran stepped forward and said, “I put it there, and if you touch it, I’ll break your arm.”

The police were called, asked if the atheist mother had threatened the veteran, was told honestly by the Christian protesters that had come out to protest the no-flag-week that she hadn’t, and admitted they’d heard the veteran say that if she touched the cross he’d placed in the box in violation of the open forums rules, that he’d break her arm. The police did nothing, which left me wondering what they’d have done if an atheist had threatened to break the arm of a Christian instead?

And that’s when I finally stopped filming out of emotional exhaustion. I edited my thousands of hours of footage down to two hours, signed up for this rather new thing called YouTube, and posted the first video documentary I’d ever made with the first video camera I’d ever bought — and went back to watching my spider monkeys paint and writing my strange philosophical sci-fi novels. I figured at least I hadn’t remained silent, even if no one heard my shout into the wilderness.

And then, the film went viral. A few prominent people contacted me and asked if they could post it on their channel. A prominent film festival contacted me and asked if I’d let them show it on a big screen at their festival in Portland (even though I hadn’t submitted it to any film festival).

The most surprising outcome was when American’s United for the Separations of Church and State asked if I’d be willing to give them a copy of all my footage and testify in Federal Court to challenge the city’s public forum. I’d interviewed Reverend Barry Lynn, the president of American’s United in Washington D.C. for the film, and he’d explained that it was tough proving in court that such public forums were based on intimidation by the community to discourage anyone but Christians from taking advantage of it.

But my film so thoroughly documented the threats and intimidation of people in King, as well as local politicians saying on camera that if a Muslim or atheist were to be drawn in the lottery, they’d have to rethink the public forum altogether — which showed their intent to keep it a public forum only as long as it was exclusively Christian.

The court case took several years, but the week before I was to testify, the town of King gave in on all counts and agreed to take down the flag and other Christian statuary at the memorial and fully respect the separation of church and state from then on.

Cavalry Baptist organized another protest rally, but only about a thousand people showed up. Yes, I got a few more threats and such, but Susan and I are still here in our old house and studios in the country. One of the funniest incidents that occurred at the second rally was when I was filming some of the speeches and a woman recognized me, despite my beard. “Are you the guy that made that crappy film about the Christian Flag Memorial?”

I said I was and asked her if she liked it.

“No, I didn’t like it!” she exclaimed.

I told her that I tried to let both sides express their views fairly.

“I admit that you did that, and I agree with everything that those Christians on our side said. You let us have our say fully, I’ll give you that much.”

“But if you feel I let you express your side’s views fairly, why are you so upset with me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked incredulously.

“Not really,”

She sighed, as if speaking to particularly dull child. “Because you let the other side speak their lies!”

When I shared this conversation on Facebook later that day, I figured some people would think I was making it up since I hadn’t been filming it, but to my delight, the woman herself saw it and commented on the post, saying that she had said exactly what I posted and she stood by it.

To this day, doing that documentary, and having it contribute to the lawsuit and setting a precedent in Federal court is probably the thing I’m most proud of. I’m not sure it made much of difference in the larger scheme of things, but at least I can say I joined some of those fighting for religious freedom against these modern-day theocrats.

I especially want to thank historian Chris Rodda for personally helping me with all the facts and documents debunking Barton and Beck. Her amazing book Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History goes through David Barton’s historical falsehoods point by point and thoroughly exposes his lies. Talking to her is like experiencing a master detective at work.

The influence of Beck and Barton’s claims are astonishingly effective to this day. David Barton is still the top seller of American History books on the subject of the Founders, and Glenn Beck continues to lionize and promote him. I suppose telling people what they want to hear is more profitable than telling them the messy truth.

Eventually, Glenn Beck’s apocalyptic conspiracy rhetoric became too much for the advertisers on FOX NEWS and his show was canceled (though FOX never specifically said they fired him).

Glenn went on to take his show private and is now using his vast platform and wealth to re-elect Donald Trump after he lost the last election and attempted overthrowing the government by convincing his followers of the lie that he’d not lost it. A lie he continues to repeat.

I wrote a Facebook post on January 5th warning of the possibility of an attempted attack on the capitol and overthrow of the government because so many people I knew honestly believed Donald Trump’s claims that there had been a coup, and if you believed that lie, the patriotic thing to do would be to take up arms and restore democracy.

Many friends wrote me and said I was paranoid and that nothing was going to happen the next day — until the next day on January 6th, when I posted a photo of the live coverage on the screen and said, “If you can convince people of something stupid, they will do something stupid.”

I realize millions of people still believe this lie about the election and see Trump as some sort of messianic savior. A couple of such people who lived near us are now in jail for their roles in storming the capitol because they believed Trump’s lies.

If anything, the movement to tear down the separation of church and state has grown ever stronger. David Barton and Glenn Beck continue to make millions peddling their revisionist lies. Billionaire Christian nationalists have used their wealth to take over most of the legislators of Texas and many other state governments with the ultimate goal of reversing those changes Baptists and Presbyterians set in motion so long before.

On our final day in the Big Apple last week, Susan and I went to the Salmagundi Club to see a show called “Inspired Arts League: Inaugural Exhibition.” Most of the artists in the show are good friends of ours that we’ve known and painted with for a long time.

I was surprised to find that the three largest paintings in the show were by the former FOX News host Glenn Beck. Turns out, the Inspired Arts League workshops happened on his ranch, and he’s been painting with the artists in the show and purchasing many of their works. I asked the show’s organizer if Glenn would be in attendance, but was told that since this was election season, he was too busy to be here in person.

“Too busy trying to re-elect a convicted felon attempting to overthrow democracy?” I wanted to ask, but kept quiet, since my wife wouldn’t be happy about getting us kicked out of yet another art show.

The Salmagundi website mentioned that several of the artists in the show would be “sharing Glenn Beck’s stories” the next day — though we were flying home in the morning so would miss that.

The show’s mission statement included a quote from Steve Jobs of Apple: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller… the storyteller sets the vision, values & agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” Stories are our greatest gift to share. We help artists find and create their stories and through this exhibition we’re thrilled to inspire you with those stories.

Inspired by these inspiring words from The Inspired Art’s League, I thought I’d tell my own Glenn Beck story here with a few surprising facts some of you might not know — about Glenn and the real origins of how Baptists and Presbyterians were the true heroes of the fight to separate church from state during the Revolutionary War.

I do agree with the quote from Steve Jobs that,“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller… the storyteller sets the vision, values & agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

I suppose it’s up to each of us to decide on election day which story to believe and which “vision, values & agenda” we’d like to support.

Feel free to send me all your angry responses, as well as to unfriend me. I’m pretty used to it by now. But, don’t expect me to stop trying to make the world a better place for those that come behind us.

Scott Burdick

You can see my documentary “In God We Trust?” on YouTube at this link.

https://youtu.be/8ucVDpmFz-E?feature=shared

or a high definition version here:

https://youtu.be/Yr2ojwGO4gg?feature=shared